ing her, Svetlana wrote, so she "had to go
on blindly alone. Again I made mistakes,
led by estate agents, by a stray conversa-
tion, by various moods." Then, in the
early eighties, in part because she believed
that she could find a better school for
Olga, Svetlana moved to England.
She and Kennan continued to write to
each other regularly. But, in the late sev-
enties, her tone changed. She was angry
that Kennan hadn't sufficiently pro-
moted her books, and that the lawyers he
hired had assigned the copyright of the
English version of "Twenty Letters" to
Priscilla Johnson McMillan, its transla-
tor. Svetlana believed that all she needed
to do in order to make money was print
more copies, and that not having the
copyright prevented her from doing so.
To each rant, Kennan responded with
restraint and, eventually, Svetlana would
apologize. But then she would, once
again, remind Kennan of what she con-
sidered to be his many flaws:
April 28, 1976
Dear George, you are unhappy---and this
is very obvious---because you constantly be-
tray yourself.
You constantly do not allow yourself to
be yourself. You've put yourself---and all
your life---into the pattern of (pardon me,
please!) that deadly Presbyterian Righteous-
ness which looks "good" only in pronounce-
ments from the pulpit.
Sept. 5, 1977
Anyway, I did not cry over someone's let-
ter for many years, yet yours put me to tears.
I know that nobody in the whole world is
able to understand my strange life better
than you do; and no one really cares. But for
some strange reason, you do.
Aug. 4, 1979
How sad, indeed, that after all these years
which we have all begun together, friend-
ships are shuttered, and even memories of
the past seems to differ so much. . . . Good-
bye, George. I feel sorry that you have as-
sociated yourself with my name for such a
long time.
Jan. 27, 1983
They tricked me. . . . I thought I am re-
ceiving an advance. IN FACT I sold ALL MY
RIGHTS to my own book. . . . You NEVER
wanted to listen to truth, because you only
liked to hear pleasantries of all sorts. I tried
desperately with many various lawyers to
get my rights back---because damn it I AM
THE AUTHOR.
Olga was eleven before she learned
who her grandfather was. One day,
paparazzi showed up at her school in
England and an administrator had to
smuggle her out in her car, hidden
under blankets. That night, her mother
explained it all. "It was a lot to process,"
Olga told me. "But there was always a lot
to process with Mom."
The next year, Svetlana was at home
in the apartment that she and Olga
shared, near the Cambridge University
Botanic Garden, when the phone rang.
"Mama, is that you?" a man said in
Russian. It was Iosif, calling for the first
time in fifteen years. Svetlana froze, and
then told him how much his voice had
changed.
"You, too---you speak like a foreign
tourist," he said.
They talked for a few minutes, and
then he said, "Call me whenever you
want!" To Svetlana, this implied that the
new Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, had
approved the phone call. "I knew my son
too well to imagine this was just his cou-
rageous intention," she later wrote.
They talked from time to time, and
Svetlana began to think about returning
to the Soviet Union. Iosif, who was now
a cardiologist, and Yekaterina, who was
a geologist, each had a child. Olga could
meet her half siblings and her cousins.
"The more my mind realized what a
shock my trip to the U.S.S.R. would be
for everyone, the more my heart insisted
on it," she wrote.
In October, 1984, she met Iosif at the
Sovietsky Hotel, in Moscow. She passed
through the revolving doors, and he
strode across the wide marble floor to
greet her. But everything seemed tense
and awkward. Svetlana noticed a woman
she considered to be ugly and old, and
was startled to learn that it was her son's
wife. Iosif refused to engage with his
American-born half sister. At dinner,
Svetlana held her son's hand in hers,
but it felt alien. "It used to be long and
slim, with beautiful fingers, a refined
hand," she wrote in "A Book for Grand-
daughters," an unpublished account of
this period, which she sent to me. "Now
the fingers have become plumper and
shorter---is such a thing possible at all?"
Yekaterina, working in Kamchatka,
didn't come. A few months later, she sent
a single-page letter to her mother, declar-
ing that she "never forgives," that she
"never could forgive," and that she did
"not want to forgive." "Then, in lan-
guage worthy of a Pravda editorial, I
was accused of every kind of mortal sin
against the beloved motherland," Svet-
lana wrote. The letter ended with the
Latin "Dixit "---"She has spoken."
The Soviet leaders boasted of Svetla-
na's return, but she was miserable there.
When approached by reporters on the
street, she swore at them in frustra-
tion. At a formal press conference, she
seemed ill-tempered and ill-mannered.
"In those cold autumn days of 1984 in
Moscow, I felt as if I was sinking into